Marcin Ramocki/selected
press

EVEN
BORING BLOGS ARE THINGS OF BEAUTY IN SOME ARTISTS’ EYES

Andrew
Lavalle (fragment)

Wall
Street Journal

For "Blogger Skins," he Googled a
handful of bloggers who write about art, then assembled a virtual mosaic of the
images that resulted. "The idea is that a Google search for people who are
very active in this community changes every day, so I wanted to capture one
specific search," he says.

The image reflects the original order of the
search results, he says, "and that creates, sort of accidentally, this
beautiful shape, but that shape also reflects the popularity of different
images." Subjects with common names had wildly random images associated
with them. The artists, though, exerted control over their search results by
filling them with their work.

TORCITO
PROJECT; sonic portraits

Vito Campanelli

Neural
(Italy)

Marcin Ramocki, a Polish
artist who's also a director of documentaries and independent curator, since
his first experiments has focused his research on the construction of metaphors
by using the most diverse software programs. Non-linear narration, be it
generative and random or interactive, is the common theme of his many projects,
even though there are other central themes, such as videogames aesthetics (especially
the retro ones), combining old and new technologies, the DIY philosophy (which
has recently become DIWO, thanks to a Furtherfield collective provocation or -
more likely - thanks to the interactive nature of web 2.0), for example in
works like Torcito Project (sonic portraits). This work is composed of seven
portraits made in the Italian region of Salento (Masseria Torcito is in
Cannole, near Lecce) in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an
"old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki.
In this grid there's the bitmap image of a human face which eventually turns
into the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an
instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode
ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind
Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano. All
these, in fact, are applications of the simple binary principle of full and
empty. As is easy to understand, there's nothing too far from the basic
principle modern digital technologies, and our information society, are based
on.

RHIZOME
NEWS: BLOGGER SKINS

Caitlin Jones

It used to be a bit creepy to
admit you googled a new friend or business acquaintance, but these ad hoc
background checks are now customary. Marcin Ramocki's latest project 'Blogger
Skins,' at artMoving Projects in Brooklyn, references the layer of character
these simplistic queries impose upon us. Often out of date, decontextualized, and
in some cases shockingly spot-on, our google search results, for good or bad,
have become inextricable from our identities. To visualize this process Ramocki
used Google's image search on art bloggers Tom Moody (tommoody.us), Paddy
Johnson (artfagcity.com), Regine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art.com), James
Wagner (jameswagner.com), and Joy Garnett (newsgrist.typepad.com), and tiled
the first one hundred images that appeared into a mosaic 'portrait' of each
critic. The snapshots point to the absurdity of such cursory investigations,
and flip the dynamic between the artist/critic and researcher/researchee
relationship. Regine Debatty becomes an art world supermodel, Paddy Johnson
appears to have a relationship with Lou Reed, and Tom Moody is an abstract art-creating
cricket player. In his own words Moody notes, 'I like what Ramocki says but
vaguely wish I didn’t have to be the proof.'

MARCIN
RAMOCKI: USELESS #5, NEWER THAN EVER

An interview with Brice Brown (fragment)

Useless
Magazine (UK)

Brice Brown: When I saw you at Art Basel in
Miami, you mentioned something about how the future of New Media was heading
toward the idea of collectors being able to access artists and their work on
the Internet, and a collector could own a percentage of the artist. It sounded
really cool, but I was drunk at the time, so could you now explain what you
meant by this prediction?

Marcin Ramocki: Sounds like I was drunk too!
Just kidding, I remember the conversation. Well, there is a whole set of issues
involved with computer and Internet based media. For example, how do we present
a New Media piece to reflect its unique character? How should it be different
from video or film? First of all, New Media art is often just software
requiring a processor to play it back. It exists as a computer application, so
it only makes sense to distribute it as such, as a piece of software which can
be put on a medium, of sorts, or directly downloaded off the internet. This
makes accessing the work so much more convenient. The artwork will no longer
exist as a singular object, becoming instead an ideology carefully produced and
promoted by an individual, or a group of individuals. They will have to change
jobs. And kind of like how a corporation has different departments, like marketing,
public relations, or accounting, artists become bloggers, curators, writers, or
gallerists. They need to retain control of the context in which the work is
consumed, because context is an integral part of the artwork.

BYDESIGN
’07

Jen
Graves (fragment)

The
Stranger (Seattle)

For a certain generation, the charm of 8 BIT
will be immediate. It’s a documentary about artworks and pieces of music that
are made from the technology, sound, imagery, and rules of early video games. A
series of artists wax in the first scene about the tinny ping of video games as
if it were the equivalent of Proust’s Madeleine, and visions of Frogger dance
in our heads. The products of these musicians (“chiptunes” writers and
improvisers) and artists – Cory Arcangel, Eddo Stern, John Klima, Bubblyfish,
Mary Flanagan, and the German-accented hip-hoppers raping about pixels.
Bodenstandig 2000, among others – can be rich or pointless, and warm or cold as
Hal. But for one generation at least, Gameboys, Nintendos, Commodores, and
Ataris are artistic mediums and instruments as surely as paint and pianos,
providing surprisingly emotional experiences. Foucault, Baudrillard, and
Deleuze come up, too, between the head-bopping performance videos. This is an
art film, after all. 8 BIT screens as part of By Design 07’, a series curated
by Peter Lucas that explores the intersection of graphic design and the moving
image.

They got game boy

Meg
Hewings (fragment)

Hour
(Montreal)

The world of Game Boy music (…) becomes a
retro throwback - a ironic wink to an electronic music scene that has a
tendency (like our culture) to worship all the newest and latest computer
technologies, programs and gadgets.

The film (…) explores the compelling
underground world of art games, revealing to us the mechanics and artistic
intention behind fascinating arty games meant to challenge and stray from that
staple of the commercial gaming industry: the mass-produced first-person
shooter game.

8 Bit is a compelling doc about the potential
powers of this relatively contemporary medium for exploring new heights of
critical thought, feeling and self- and artistic expression.

The
do-it-yourself approach is a common theme in the field of video-game art, which
includes everything from films and videos to music played on a Game Boy.

"People
in their late 20s and early 30s are bringing their first cultural experience to
the table and deconstructing it," said Marcin Ramocki, the director of the
game-art documentary 8 Bit, to be screened next Wednesday.

"Older
computer technology, older consoles, various musical media like audiotapes --
all these things are part of an aesthetic that is slightly retro and slightly
nostalgic."

Digiscape: Unexplored Terrain

Catalogue essay by Jill Conner (fragment)

Marcin
Ramocki pushes the envelope of digital art further and layers sound with the
visual in an interactive installation titled “History/Tectonics”(2003-04).
Presenting a screen populated with landscape of letters, Ramocki puts a twist
on the act of data mining and invites viewers to input their own ideas upon the
screen, using the keyboard provided.

As words are added, the letters randomly infiltrate the
screen and continue the drawing that was started by the artist. The act of
typing is also accompanied with the sound of handwriting, which is incidentally
turning into an archaic phenomenon as the digital age continues to progress.

Flavor Pill

Long before Beck introduced the masses to
bleep with his Hell Yes EP, circuit-bending obsessives were cracking open Game
Boys to unleash customized Super Mario sounds. Marcin Ramocki's 8 BIT: A
Documentary about Art and Videogames situates these hackers somewhere between
self-reflective, pop-art technocrats and geeky gamers, pondering the nature of
digital inspiration. 8 BIT shows that this genre isn't limited to Frogger-fied
funk either: abstract robotic experimentalism peacefully co-exists with booming
sine-wave grooves. And if you stick around until the end they might divulge the
secret code to PokŽmon Mystery Dungeon. (MG)

Games have been around long enough that most
of us can't even remember a time when they weren't. Everyone has either grown
up with a 2600, NES, or whatever else machine in our homes, or at least knew
someone who had one, and more than likely when we weren't playing games, each
of us were talking and thinking about them well after the power was turned off.
Looking back, we now have fuzzy warm memories of our favorite games and all the
things relating to them, hence why video games have become a part of us, our
identities, even our culture. Naturally, anything so pervasive in people's
lives will become the subject of analysis and self-expression via art, and that
is what 8 BIT is all about.

8 BIT is one of the first real documentaries
of its kind; previously there's only been assorted offerings from PBS and other
cable channels that tried examining the medium, but most are nothing more than
just sloppy, factually inaccurate, and at times downright condescending
infomercials produced by people who seemingly have zero grasp of the subject
matter. This new film on the other hand simply presents to the viewer
individuals who either grew up with video games, or are intrigued by them on a
certain level, and have thus created works to express their attachment and/or
fascination.

…

The entire film is very easy to follow, with
concepts and ideas flowing and connecting to each other seamlessly. And you
honestly can't say about most films and television specials that have come
before it. The editing is excellent, as is the use of illustrations and footage
from games to paint various pictures, and each of the interviews, despite one's
personal opinions of what is said, help to drive the filmmaker's intent. And
that is to catalogue and document this emerging art scene. In the end, despite
its problems, the good definitely outweigh the bad. 8 BIT is the start of
something, and a very good one at that.

VH-1 Game Break

8-Bit: The Best Game Movie Ever Made

by Harold Goldberg (fragment)

On Saturday night, I walked into the world of
wonder that is the Museum of Modern Art. There, the hipsters from the cool
areas of town greeted each other with fake enthusiasm. But also there, the
video game documentary “8-Bit” had its worldwide premiere.

Guys, this low budget production by Marcin
Ramocki and Justin Strawhand is clearly the best movie about video games that's
ever been made. Forget insulting crapola like the Game Show Network's “GSN
Video Games” (2003). Here, the documentarians don't spend much time on the
history of video games, although smug movie critic turned video game expert Ed
Halter put the history into perspective succinctly.

This movie's about how games
affect our culture, how the genre crosses the culture to influence music, art
and the way we think.

Art Fag City

Video Game Culture Thrives in New
Documentary

By Paddy Johnson (fragment)

Illuminating clips and observations like these
make the movie. The filmmakers work with the awareness that it isn't enough to
simply say that artists grew up playing videogames; rather, they must attempt
to illustrate what this means to this group of people. As a common attribute,
the blogger and artist Moody tells me, "The DIY (do it yourself), hacker,
guerrilla mindset is a constant theme... [T]he topic is bigger than videogames.
One thing I like about the film is it casts its net wider than just a small
scene."

And despite the omission I mentioned earlier,
Moody is right. As the first movie of its kind to document and situate the
8-bit scene within contemporary art discourse, 8 BIT should be recognized for
its potential to become a seminal document of 21st century new media arts.

Moma Calendar

Marcin Ramocki's 8 BIT

October 7–11, 2006

A combination "rockumentary," art
exposŽ, and culture-critical investigation, 8 BIT ties together the 1980s
demo scene, chip-tune music, and artists using "machinima" and
modified computer games. Produced in New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, and
Tokyo, the documentary brings a global perspective to the new artistic
approaches of the DIY generation that grew up playing Atari, Commodore 64, and
other video game consoles.

Organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator,
Department of Film and Media.

Marcin Ramocki – a young Polish
multimedia artist again distinctively marks his presence on the cultural map of
New York City.

ArtMoving Projects gallery in Williamsburg
opened up an exhibition of recent conceptual works by Marcin Ramocki. Once
again, his artwork comments on the principles of participating in the
contemporary universe ruled by media. The main piece in the show is an
interactive

installation “Anti-Pharmakon”. A chromed computer
keyboard serves both as an instrument and an art object. Each key triggers a
short sound track, mostly one-word fragments from various political speeches of
the second half of the 20th century, including Che Guevara, Margaret Thatcher
and George Bush. Users interacting with the piece inevitably generate the

feeling of total verbal chaos. According to
the artist, the work is only superficially political; the

main conceptual focus lays in exposing the
impact of pre-structured media interface elements on our thought process.
Another piece: “Torcito Project” consists of seven portraits of
artists-participants of last summer’s Torcito artist residence in Italy. The
images were created using the interface of “Virtual Drummer” program, which in
effect translated the visuals into sonic variations.

Edge Magazine (UK)

Art Bits

While text-adventure documentary Get Lamp and
the recently announced Arcade -- a look not so much at arcade games but the history
of the spaces themselves -- both keep their feet planted firmly on solid
ground, a new movie by Brooklyn artist Marcin Ramocki instead is documenting
the movement that aims to deconstruct the very foundations on which gaming has
been built.

Looking from the description and the short
preview trailer to be a veritable who's-who of the bit-bending underground, 8
BIT features musical and conversational appearances by such artists as Cory
Arcangel, BIT SHIFTER, Mary Flanagan, Glomag, Paul Johnson, John Klima,
Nullsleep, Tom Moody, TEAMTENDO, and Treewave, commenting on the overlap and
interplay between the conceptual art, game, and electronic music communities.

Set to premiere October 7th at New York's
Museum of Modern Art, the film, says the website, "insists that in the
21st century Game-Boy rock, machinima and game theory belong together and share
a common root: the digital heritage of Generation X."

NYArts Magazine

Digital Futures

Midori Yoshimoto

After enjoying the
physical interaction with Huang's piece, the spectator is offered opportunities
for cerebral interaction through Marcin Ramocki's living computer software, The
History. The viewer types a word on a keyboard on a pedestal in the middle of
the gallery. Inside the pedestal is a computer that inserts the newly-typed
word into a pre-existing sequence of words randomly chosen from a 150-word
poem. In the wall projection, black squares containing white letters emerge
from the bottom and rapidly accumulate at the top. As the magma-like flow of
words changes direction and leaves traces behind, an abstract digital landscape
forms. The electronic scribing sound that accompanies this movement changes
pitch whenever the first word hits the margin of the screen. The new words
added by the viewers eventually replace the original set of words as well as
the pattern that evolves from them. By moving a mouse, a viewer can also erase
or stop words. As a whole, the work alludes to the way history is cumulatively,
and somewhat arbitrarily, created and erased. The growth of digital words does
not cease just as the real history has a life of its own.

Tom Moody Blog

Marcin Ramocki at Artmoving

An interactive computer piece by Marcin
Ramocki, still in development, currently on view at artMoving Projects in
Brooklyn. A gallery visitor is typing a straight line of text across the top of
the screen. As he types the letters fall slowly to the bottom, just like snow,
fall leaves, or advancing Space Invaders. When he reaches the right hand side,
a carriage return sound cha-chings and he can type no more till all letters
have settled to the bottom. After many more left-to-right sweeps the letters
pile up, but even after days of straight typing, the pile will never fill more
than half the screen because the alphabet "soil" is slowly
decaying--again, like leaves on a forest floor. Much hand coding lies behind
this deceptively low-tech-looking piece, which melds the naturalism of Thoreau
and the futility of Beckett in a medium somewhere between concrete poetry and
Intellivision.

Tart Magazine (Canada)

Paying for my Sins

By Jillian Mcdonald

For weeks I carried in my wallet two credit
cards that don't work in the usual way. In fact, I don’t know if they work at all.
Its not that I maxed them out, but they neither give me access to money I don't
have, nor are they linked to information about my identity. If someone stole
them I wouldn’t worry about my credit or identity theft, but my superstitious
side might recoil. These credit cards are out of the ordinary - though not like
the ones which, ‘pre-approved’, I am offered weekly by mail - and I've been
thinking about them a lot. Thinking so much that I excavated them from my
wallet. Hanging on my bedroom wall in a tidy glassed-in frame seems a
comfortable protective distance from my person.

The credit cards are an artwork by Marcin
Ramocki, a digital artist based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A limited edition of
seven artist-designed mass-produced cards which each represent one of the seven
deadly sins - Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Greed, and Sloth in
case you forgot – ownership of the cards promises (if you believe it)
protection against specific trespasses. In the tradition of saints’ medals,
rosary beads, and prayer cards, perhaps they do. Mine now dangle like a
talisman or my Turkish roommate’s watchful eye that graces our kitchen wall. I
confess I’m treating them a bit more like the familiar crucifix that hung in my
own heavily Catholic childhood home - with a mixture of fear and wonder.

Ramocki based the design of this plastic
line on the seven credit cards he rode to bankruptcy in 1998, and until closer
examination they look exactly like classic credit cards except that these ones
don’t have raised metallic characters. They do have pornographic collage in the
case of the Lust card, the photo of a semi-cherubic child - eyes wide as
saucers to embody Envy, black stripes dripping into entropy for Sloth, and a
syrupy non-nutritional ingredients list on Gluttony.

Shortly after we met, Ramocki offered me
a card of my choice – a loaded gift that I nevertheless couldn’t turn down. I
must confess it’s been a while since I visited my sins, and it took me weeks to
decide which of the deadlies I needed defense against. The process of my
decision sparked a great amount of conversation and nostalgia among friends
over late night libations. For my part I recalled my father, a former Roman
Catholic priest, singing an aural DJ mix of Latin masses and Hank Snow tunes
that were hopelessly, delightfully as out of tune as they were incomprehensible
to his children. I recalled my mother, the real religious one, lining up her
three little ones to make helpful suggestions about what we ought to confess. I
was the oldest, and the biggest sinner, she liked to say. Alone in the
confessional with eyes widening, knots of internal fear tightened, and oh how
my tiny knees shook. I was virtually petrified with silence every time I
genuflected before a veiled priest, heart absolutely still until I was off the
hook and out of the booth. Confessionals were designed to be purifying devices,
like major kitchen appliances that washed sinners clean, absolving us of stain.
I only saw them as medieval instruments of torture. I truly felt I had nothing
to confess, and perhaps I was guilty of a pride where I could do no wrong,
though I felt like my shyness was a mortal blemish. I lost my faith at a young
age - I couldn’t believe in Santa Claus because he neglected to appear in the
night sky the Christmas Eve I waited, and no matter how hard I tried, I could
never muster the blind faith for any other set of ideas.

And yet, years later, I found myself
confessing to this young Polish-born artist my sins from the passenger seat of
his silver parked car. Come on Jillian, which will it be? Perhaps it was easier
without the power imbalance and having lost at least a measure of my
little-girl shyness. Okay, I’ll give you two. So I confessed in full sunlight
to lust (because falling in love with the wrong people has been my greatest
personal downfall in recent years), and covetousness (because sometimes, on
occasion, I wish desperately for things and conditions I don’t have – high
speed internet, a cinema display computer monitor, a better apartment, time off
from work, the endurance to run a marathon…). Okay wrong answer, I’m painting a
squeaky clean - read boring - character in a grimy plot. My sins aren’t the
deadly sort and I might as well get a “Jesus is my Home-boy” t-shirt, right?
Its cooler to be a sinner in New York which though not THE sin city is a city
that wears its guilty pleasures well. I confess I do want it all, and the
occasional panic attacks I suffer are the price I pay for my sins. But lets
move on - guilt and regret are useless punishment for these quotidian sins and
drama-queen was never my style.

I first moved to New York eight years
ago on a hot summer afternoon. I sat on my doorstep that day taking a break.
Taking in the wonder that is Brooklyn, I noticed a church down the block in
mid-conversion to a bank. How absurd I thought, are banks the new churches?
I’ve since discovered that the city’s denizens are conditioned to believe the
tenets of a different religion – be the best (pride), give in to your desires
(lust), enjoy the culinary delights (gluttony), have it all (greed, envy)… It’s
a confusing cultural message in eternal conflict with any ‘no sinning’ policy.
About the only sin New Yorkers won’t confess to easily is sloth - it’s a point
of pride to demonstrate loudly that one is busier than at least the next
person. I asked Ramocki what he is guilty of. Sloth he replied. The survey says
most people he asked chose Lust or Anger.

Do I feel protected? It’s too early to
say, I haven't yet been tempted. This is however an exercise in restraint, for
I feel that someone or something is making sure I don’t step over any lines.
The cards on the wall, behind their cool glass, seem innocent yet invested with
meaning. Through my own cognizance I am painfully aware of their purpose. Ramocki’s
image, as a babe in one of them, looks to the sky and out of the frame with a
desire that is not suppressed – the child, like all of us, wants something and
wants it bad.

Code, Shadows and (Non)Grids

WBURG's editor chats up Marcin Ramocki

Recently, I sat down with Marcin Ramocki and
talked with him about his work and vertexList, the new gallery space he has
opened this month at 138 Bayard Street. A native of Poland, he moved to the US
when he was 17. Marcin has lived in Williamsburg since the late 90s. His work
is featured at www.rhizome.net and at www.cabinetmagazine.org.

CS: So how did you come to start to work on
the computer?

MR: I had been using photographic images for a
while, and then I realized that I could manipulate them in Photoshop. I was in
graduate school, I was amazingly poor and I ran out of paint. So I decided to
try a piece that was just photographic, and printed a manipulated photograph
onto plexi using an acrylic transfer method, with some painting on the back –
sort of a hybrid. This went on for about a year. Eventually, I started
programming the images and removed myself from the physical realm altogether. I
took a class in Micromedia Director, found that I liked it, and ended up
teaching it to myself and at my first job.

So I taught this class and I made my first
piece and this led to sort of a five-year period in my work which involved
making random generators out of video. And that’s how it started. For the last
five years I’ve been shooting video and then writing programs that randomize it
- in different ways.

CS: And in Virtual Singer there’s something
that’s input from each user’s computer that effects the randomness in a unique way?

MR: Well, yes, but you never know how that
happens – there is a random seed that comes out of the computer that decides
what’s the particular sequence of the sound [emanating from the Singer’s
mouth].

CS: That’s such a great phrase, “random seed…”

MR: It comes from programming, just like
vertex list . . . Random seed, basically, is a number that comes out of the
functioning of the computer. Because there is nothing like “random,” it doesn’t
exist –

CS: - in the computer –

MR: - Anywhere. Everything is specific, I
think. And in the computer, for sure, it's all zeroes and ones. . . the random
seed is a somewhat random-looking number. There is a specific source for the
random number that is provided by the machine of every end-user. My program
looks at the date, the time or the amount of memory used, runs that program
through a bunch of algorithms and spits out a random seed.

CS: And how is that random seed used in
programming, since most people don't program for randomness?

MR: I think oftentimes you need a random
number. For example, screen savers. Screen savers need to start in some place
and then act out their little games -

CS: Because the simulacrum is as close as you
can get to the Platonic idea of the essence of something?

MR: Um, I wouldn't go there. I don't know if that's
the way I think about it, I just simply have to deal with a certain type of
medium and I'm trying to analyze it and figure out what are its establishing,
crucial elements. And the computer's all about pretending that things can
happen. They're for simulation. But once you accept the fact that you are in
that simulation, you can start communicating. (Laughs . . . ) "I'll show
you my simulation, you show me your simulation." I've thought about it in
terms of trying to comment on life - about its unpredictability. So, in a way,
I am talking about pretending to be life, in a different way than painting or
video. The Singer is the "cyborg" that tries to trick you that he's
alive, but all he has to prove it with is a very limited vocabulary.

I believe in the equi-vocal character of that
event - you have that code and you have the optical/aural, the sensual event -
that's really the core of my philosophy, my art. There is the thing that
imitates reality, and the underlying language that runs it. My work comes out
of painting and from the writing of the code.

CS: This doesn't have any religious overtones,
does it? Because there's something about Virtual Singer that is mystical - the
idea of this solitary head chanting repetitively . . .

MR: Well, I was brought up Catholic, and once
you are brought up Catholic . . . in the very old, traditional city of Krakow,
and going to the church with my grandmother was part of my life . . . but I
made this piece when I was doing an investigation into Buddhism, so maybe
that's why.

CS: In a strange way, Virtual Singer reminds
me of those stone grids of Mel Bochner's from the 70s where he placed the
stones in small, gridded triangles and squares down on the floor near the wall,
and the potential was there to kick the stones and mess the whole thing up. As
if the stones were a living language, but the grid would always be underlying.

MR: It's funny that you should mention the
grid of language, because I did a piece called Japanatious, and it takes the
entire Japanese language, every sound in Japanese - in Japanese the meaning is
based in the syllable - in which I videotaped a person saying random phonemes
of Japanese, and then programmed the image and sound to randomize, and the
resulting text actually makes a nonsensical poetry. And it writes it as it says
it, too. I'm specifically interested in grids and breaking the grid. And
exposing the function of the grid through software.